Before bringing home a Hamster, make sure you have considered the full impact of your decision. Below is a brief overview of the type of needs a Hamster might require and what you will need to consider for the life time care of a Hamster…
— from AdoptAPet.com
The contest was unfair from the beginning, and I guess I knew it. But after a couple of drinks, you sometimes start doing stupid things.
Unless you’re a hamster, and you can hold your liquor.
I’m definitely not a hamster. Not even close, as it turns out.
I adopted a hamster several months ago, partly to keep me company during the various lockdowns and “just stay home” mandates. I had considered Match.com, but then I found an article on AdoptAPet.com, and quickly realized how much cheaper it would be to live with a hamster.
I named him Harley, and he seemed to like the name. He also seemed to like Jim Beam.
There’s apparently a scientific explanation for this. Hamsters evolved in the wild — of course — which would be the wilds of Syria, a place no self-respecting hamster would feel comfortable nowadays. (Just a passing political comment that has no real bearing on this story.) Anyway, in their natural habitat, hamsters hoard grass seeds and fruits to get them through the cold winter months, and as anyone who has ever hoarded grass seeds and fruit knows very well, these foods tend to ferment. So hamsters have become genetically disposed to consuming foods with a high alcohol content.
Coincidentally, they are genetically disposed to ‘living it up’ during the winter. As I found out on Saturday night.
Not all animals are blessed with a tolerance for booze. Elephants, for example, are absolute lightweights when it comes to firewater, because they lack a gene for metabolizing alcohol. We’re all very lucky that elephants don’t hoard grass seeds and fruit for the winter, or else our prehistoric ancestors might never have survived those early millennia in Africa.
Hamsters, on the other hand, can metabolize alcohol like nobody’s business. In fact, they like booze better than almost any kind of beverage. When a psychologist named Gwen Lupfer studied alcohol consumption in hamsters at the University of Alaska Anchorage, she discovered they preferred unsweetened Everclear to plain water, and would consume an average of 18 grams per kilogram of body weight, each day. That’s the alcoholic equivalent of a human drinking a liter and a half of 190-proof Everclear.
I knew all of this information before I challenged Harley to a drinking contest on New Year’s Eve. But we’re both bachelors, and we both like to have fun.
To make things fair (given that I am somewhat larger than Harley) I found a glass thimble that I thought resembled a shot glass, and then used a full-size shot glass for myself. The game proceeded like this: every time I downed a shot, I filled Harley’s thimble with Jim Beam (using an eye dropper) and he quickly slurped up his portion.
We would then take a pause, enjoy the warm feeling spreading through our veins, and spend a few minutes discussing the benefits of being a bachelor. I did most of the talking, of course. Harley mostly listened.
Then repeat. I take a shot. He takes a shot. We discuss women.
Last thing I remember, the room had become a slow-moving carousel, and Harley was telling me about a cute Syrian girl he hooked up with in a Denver pet store.
But I might have been imagining things, at that point.
What I do know for sure is, when I woke up on New Year’s Day — with a killer headache — the bottle was nearly empty, and Harley was working out on his hamster wheel as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.